A big part of advancing your career includes enhancing your resume. There will be new skills you pick up along the way, and it helps to let others know about them. This consists of the tools you use in your daily work. Even those that you use occasionally can be the first step into a new job.
Enhancing Your Resume, Not Spamming Key Words
First and foremost, this topic is not about spamming your resume with tool names. Instead, this should be an exercise of putting things on your resume that make you who you are. Where languages and platforms are the most valuable aspects of your professional profile, tools are also useful in enhancing your resume. These items tend to be secondary requirements for a position. On the other hand, they can be the difference in you getting a job or someone else.
An Imperfect Process
We have complained about the recruiting process in the past so we will skip that in this episode. Nevertheless, there are cases where the framework or tools you know best make you a better candidate for a position. For example, there is a big difference in knowing JavaScript or being proficient in Angular. Tools like an IDE or version control solution can also be essential in ramping up at a new position. The challenge is figuring out what might be of value to a recruiter in vetting your resume.
Unfortunately, we can not know the essential things in every case. Our dream job may elude us if we do not mention our experience with Maven. Therefore, we should take the “more is better” approach. I find a useful metric for determining whether to put something on your resume is whether you can consider yourself skilled or if you have mastered it. Even applications like Word or Excel can fall in this category if you can create new and useful documents from scratch or are comfortable with advanced features.
Investment Equals Value
Another rule of thumb to consider is whether you spent time learning the tool. The database application TOAD is common, and I remember spending several weeks getting comfortable with how to use it effectively. That time spent is not needed for a new customer, so there is value in it. Thus, I might list the application on my resume. The possibility of whether I include it is related to how current my knowledge of the tool is. In this case, TOAD is something I have not used in several years, so I have dropped it off of my resume. I may mention it if a customer is looking for someone with that knowledge, but can clarify that the skills are rusty.
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